In "Our Friend Fluid Metal," Nancy Rubins explodes an abandoned children's playground, sprinkled with thick, aluminum figures of grinning hippos, rideable ponies and wide-eyed giraffes. The metallic beasts, often smiling despite their chipped paint and unveiled innards, appear relatively sturdy and rigid, even when swept into mid-air and left there, hovering in an organic structure bound by strands of heavy wire.

In her first New York exhibition of major sculptures, Rubins presents four gargantuan sculptures made from elements of children's playgrounds made in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The pop eruption resembles a kitsch Noah's arc swept into a hurricane and frozen there by some supernatural force. The...